President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt yesterday tried to shift some of the blame for last week's attack in Luxor on to foreign governments, saying that by harbouring Islamist leaders they encouraged violence. "Had foreign states not given shelter to those who got severe sentences [in Egypt], this would not have taken place," he told journalists in the southern tourist city of Aswan.
"If you do not want your sons to be killed, why do you protect killers?
"There are people who carried out crimes and who were sentenced [in Egypt] who live on British land and in other states such as Afghanistan," he added.
This is not the first time such claims have been made by Mr Mubarak, and they echo a statement made on Saturday by his newly-appointed interior minister, Maj Gen Habib el-Adly, who told the Egyptian parliament that "terrorist operations inside Egypt rely on training and finance offered by fugitive elements taking refuge in foreign countries".
Egypt's largest militant group, al-Gama'a el-Islamiya, has claimed responsibility for the attack at the 3,400-year-old Pharaonic temple in which 68 people died last Monday.
Leaflets found on the bodies of the killers mentioned Mustafa Hamza, a Gama'a leader thought to be living in Afghanistan. Police have also identified one of the killers as Midhat Abdel-Rahman, who they say left Egypt in 1993 for Pakistan and Sudan.
Many Egyptian militant leaders fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, receiving military and intelligence training in northern Pakistan.
Despite the government's claims, however, little is known about the extent of exiles' control of armed groups like the one that carried out Monday's attack. Many analysts believe they provide inspiration rather than issuing direct orders.
Apart from attributing blame abroad over the weekend, the Egyptian government also admitted that it had made mistakes and announced a series of measures designed to provide "watertight" security at tourist sites.
Several senior police officials have already been replaced, and more look likely to lose their jobs as an internal investigation determines the scale of the security lapses which allowed the killers to hunt down their victims for as long as 45 minutes without interruption.
For the first time the military is to be brought in to help protect sites of antiquity. It will be responsible for securing the desert terrain that surrounds many of the monuments.
Training for the police, thousands of whom are illiterate conscripts, is also to be upgraded and the antiquities and tourist divisions of the force are to be merged.
Ironically, before last week's attack, many visitors complained that they found the police presence obtrusive.
Whether the beefed-up security will deter would-be attackers more than tourists remains to be seen.
Two bodies among those of 36 tourists from Switzerland killed in Luxor last week remain unidentifed four days after being returned home, the Swiss Foreign Ministry said yesterday. One of the two may be a corpse wrongly sent to Switzerland in the belief it was that of a mother whose 16year-old daughter was also murdered in the temple massacre, a weekly newspaper reported.